Robert Knight, lead maintainer of Konsole has launched a Konsole Usage Survey. 28 questions are waiting for your answers. Use this chance to give useful feedback about a vital and often-used base application of KDE to enable Robert to make Konsole the best console application for KDE 4.

We are in 2007 and I still use, aside from firefox and gaim, almost only konsole, or term based applications to be more specific. Do you have any problem with that?

I don't feel geek, but I do feel that I'm using the right tool for what I need. If it's not your case... man who cares! This is about Konsole, not about "ohh god! still using vim instead of gvim or kate or blablabla"

Well, the truth is that if you don't like it, please use a gui instead. I use the shell primarily for all my tasks. Trust me, the power of the shell has to be learnt and experienced to understand.

All said, konsole is the best shell emulator - the others don't even come close to the tabs, tab shortcut, and bookmark features. I've seen a lot of people flame kde in general, but they all seem to agree that konsole doesn't have a competition :)

If you read carefully my post, I didn't say that, however sometimes you *need* a console. I use if mostly for work, but even on the desktop it can prove a useful shortcut in certain occasions.

Just from the top of my head, I had to do this today:
from a base directory, find all mp3 files, and write a text file containing the name of the file without the extension, colon, the full path to the file.
i.e.:
song1: artist/album/song1.mp3
song2: another_artist/different_album/song2.mp3

(the actual task was slightly more complicated, but I simplified it for clarity)

Now, the day some GUI application allows me to do this, in a simple, clean and intuitive way, maybe I'll stop using a terminal. Until then...

Regards,

Wackou.

PS: remember that some people work with their computer, not only use it as a media center...

Well, if we were able to use directory trees as spreadsheet, I wouldn't mind.

You would be doing "basename" functions there on cells instead of `basename ...` calls, etc.

May be even more powerful, if you ask me.

But until then, I agree, the console allows automation with tremendous flexibility that is unmatched.

My digital photos e.g. are mailed to the studio that prints them with KMail and need to be attached. I can't do all in one mail. So it takes me only a little script to feed 10 images per mail automatically into Kmail, with To: and Subject: correctly filled. Would I do this manually, it would hurt me, with like 300 pictures. (Uploading them per HTML form in terms of one by one on a 10 element form would hurt even more, which is their alternative. I could do that with wput, but the email way has the nice advantage of being async and retry, and everything in the background with state of completion, and their email confirmation too).

How on earth would I otherwise e.g. find all ".tar.gz" and repack them into ".tar.bz2" in the background for space savings, without any manual intervention.

For mass renaming operations I used to create scripts, but I now prefer krename for that, as it's more flexible with greater ease (although not more flexible absolute). So that's no longer a point for console. I actually start krename from konsole often though as it's e.g. easier to find files that are not yet renamed with find.

I use computers for my daily work, no problem at this point, yesterday I was reading an IT blog and it seems adobe has released a cross platform runtime environment to deploy a new generation of application like ajax but they still work even offline, it is crazy man, just click a link and it is up and running.
Ok after that I come to the dot, and guess what, people are excited about how Konsole is so cool and sexy. I used console especially for linux, sometimes I have no choice or perhaps I dont know other ways to do it in a GUI mode.
So my post was rather subjective. And sorry if I hurt your beloved console.

The thing is, as someone mentioned it before, this article is about Konsole, so yeah, you'll fine people praising a console application here, not that brand new Apollo thingy... I guess people weren't talking about Konsole in the Apollo article, either. It's just the context.

So yeah, among others posts, there's mine saying that for a console app, Konsole is pretty sexy. Of course, at the sexy level, it doesn't even compare to Amarok or other GUI apps, but hell, people never talk about it (Amarok, K3b and Konqueror steal all the fame), so I was quite thrilled that for once, someone was putting Konsole in the spotlight. Which may explain my over-enthusiasm!!

'I guess people weren't talking about Konsole in the Apollo article, either. It's just the context'
No they were speaking about the next generation desktop application paradigm, not about eh 40 years old (perhaps more) user interface
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And one article the 'next generation desktop application paradigm' (yeah just like XUL was the next generation last generation) was on topic, and on the other the '40 year old user interface' was on topic.

Talking about Apollo here is pointless (unless you're references it as somehow that Konsole can be improved, which hasn't happened).

we're in 2007 and some people still don't understand that advanced users are users too.

You can go ahead and make the desktop as easy to learn, and as easy to use (two completely different, and often conflicting goals) as you like - as long as you don't cripple it for those of us who actually know what we're doing.

I use Amarok for listening to my music (and rediscovering it!), K3b to burn CDs, and more generally any GUI app that lets me do the stuff I want the way I want. However, sometimes I _need_ to to console-based stuff, and I am glad to have an equally good application for this, not just some old terminal that sucks...

People do not wonder why we still write programs in a text editor (or IDE), using (oh my god!) a keyboard, rather than connecting blocks with a mouse.

I think it all boils down to the same problem: GUI apps are tailored to a specific task, and allow you (arguably) to perform it in an easier and more intuitive way. However, sometimes you need the flexibility to describe exactly what you want to do, and more often than not, it is much faster to do this by writing it by hand, rather than clicking in a list of options pre-selected for you...

And to expand on the parent's comment, even Microsoft realized they needed a better shell in Vista.

We have very powerful and precise machine tools today, but sometimes a hammer and a saw, ancient devices to be sure, are still quite useful. Use the right tool for the job and the one that fits your thinking patterns. For many of us, the terminal is appropriate for many jobs. For others it is not. Use what's best for you and leave everyone else alone.

Fine, I must admit my post was inappropriate for the topic of this dot, I just hate terminal, it remind me of all those dumb terminal we used in university learning FORTRAN ( it was an altrix DEC system)

I don't know about you, but I type _much_ faster than I can use a mouse (i.e. my laptop's touchpad). Also, many tasks are far better suited for a terminal (e.g. system administration, running Vim/Emacs, remote system administration via SSH or telnet (!), tasks involving piping output to input like grep/awk/sed/perl/find, movie encoding (!), and many others).

And as many others have already pointed out, we power users are still users, and my guess is that the majority of KDE users are power users (the newbies all seem to flock to GNOME; I blame Ubuntu ;p), so I would hope that they work on programs for us! :)

in my case; I use only linux in my home mepis, but in work we use manage very complex projects using planning software and stuff like dynamically linked spreadsheet to database servers, and guess what my colleagues dont even know what is the meaning of this strange thing  console-
Ok i I dont know whats your definition of those users, I suppose as they dont use console they are just newbie,

My point is stay humble, and the day when we dont need to open all those weird programs under console just to do a rudimentary operation, then Linux will be a serious choice for desktop users.

Do you at least have an apt-unget in Debian to revert to the previous version of KDE? In Gentoo all I have to do is download the source code for the previous version, recompile it and install it... all in portage.

now when you right click on a tab there would be an option "insert list" which inserts content 1 in the tab you are currently in, content 2 in the next tab, etc.

other usefull features would then be:
"auto spawn tabs" when needed, which spawns tabs if there are more list items then tabs. (so you don't have to open 15 consoles before setting the insert in all tabs option)
"switch to insert in all tabs on insert list", allowing you to be extra lazy.

Sweet. How is it going to handle viewing all the sessions? I use clusterssh for that sort of thing and it opens an xterm for each ssh connection and tiles all the windows. With as many machines I admin, I require dual screen to use it, but I don't see any other way. My point is, I need to see all the sessions I'm typing into. Kick ass feature none the less!

In the survey, I asked about "Show Terminal Emulator" in Konqueror. I'm worried that KDE 4 will lose this feature, which I use more often than Konsole. Kate has "Show Terminal" hidden in its menus, and I use this very often as well. I also suggested that "Show Terminal Emulator" be added as a button on all KDE windows.

also a very dangerus feature, ever started to write something and then decided to change directory using the gui and it will run that command and change dir. If there is something with rm there you could if your unlucky wipeout your home directory or something

unlucky and stupid, that is...
for real yes, that is a design flaw... rather it should save the typed command in a buffer, remove from the terminal, cd into the new folder and reinsert from the buffer. anyone filed a report yet? X:=P

I think having YaKuake built into KDE 4 would be a better solution. Then you could just have a tab that automatically syncs to the directory open in dolphin/konqueror/text editor/whatever.

OTOH, I think this is the advantage of Dolphin. since this isnt an often used feature, it can be removed from dolphin but remain in konqueror for the people that want it(and if they use this, chances are, they will also want many of the other features in konqueror that arent found in dolphin).